Climate change – call the fire brigade

a sort of reasonable rant

If your house catches fire, you call the fire department. The guys (mostly) at the fire station say they’ll be right on over. Sirens and clatter and ladders and hoses. Usually, they save the day.

Now, with carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases polluting the earth’s atmosphere at a dangerous, accelerating pace, causing unprecedented extreme weather, record floods, and wildfires worldwide, who do you call? Politicians? Not the right skill set, apparently. Businessmen? Getting warm.

So your house is on fire. You call the fire department. There’s a crew there. Each has a different opinion about what’s happening. One guy says, “Cynthia’s house is on fire! Let’s go! Another guy says, “What fire? There’s no fire. I don’t see no fire.” Over by the fire truck, another guy says, “Let’s go turn the fire down. Then we set targets and deadlines, and monitor the situation.”

OK, so who do you call? Really.

You talk to practical and pragmatic leaders of the world community, roughly categorized in two groups:

1) The biosphere brigade

This includes religious leaders who persuade their congregations to see the benefits of an emergency one-child policy. (Seriously. You do that. But don’t do it alone.) You talk to farmers, landowners, mining companies, forest industries.

This first group is responsible for seeing to it that humans stop overrunning the planet and having their way with it. Steadfastly polite, you talk to religious leaders and say your bit. You get farmers to be as friendly as possible to natural systems, and you get forestry companies to plant trees and conserve vegetation. The main point here is biosphere restoration. This takes care of about 25 – 35 % of greenhouse gas emissions.

2) The engineering brigade

You find these professionals managing the world’s energy sector. They are running electric grids, manufacturing automobiles and aeroplanes, making steel and cement, designing buildings, and building homes.

With their help, you mobilize all designers, trades people and laborers in those industries; then you do what it takes to swap out the energy conversion devises (ECDs) in those industries that run on fossil fuels. You replace them with ECDs that run on electricity, or biofuel. You ask them to drop what they’re doing and … PUT OUT THE FIRE.

It’s a real fire! And with fire, you deal with combustion. You stop combustion. Obviously, you don’t burn down trees, for example. So that’s what you do in the energy sector. And what that means is the machines we use to power the equipment of modern civilization stop burning fossil fuel.

But you can’t just switch them off. You have to replace them. That is the mission.

It is possible we humans will not get it together to put out the fire. In that case, we will have to live, at best, in a seriously compromised earthly environment. Parts of the globe will be uninhabitable. Major cities will be have to build dykes against the sea. Some won’t be able to. But the earth will be OK. It has been in a similar condition before. Things will be very different for us, for sure, but the earth will be OK.